Sales Lead

What is a sales lead?

A sales lead is a prospective customer, someone who you could contact to introduce your company’s services or products to. A sales lead is potentially the start of a business relationship dependant of course on the outcome of your contact with them.

There are several methods of generating new sales leads, one of which is through prospecting; essentially targeting people who meet particular criteria that you have deemed could be relevant for the company’s services or products that you are selling.

Gaining sales leads which turn into customers is good news on one hand but on the other it creates more work. Can you credit check all of them for example and can you handle the increase in orders and cope with the additional volumes going through your business? Most importantly can you do this while at the same time giving a high level of service? Creating sales leads is imperative to the growth and sustenance of any business but good customer service is important in retaining business once you win it. Marketers intent on gathering sales leads in the UK often append, or enhance their company’s existing customer data to help give them an insight into how best they can obtain the best type of sales lead for their business.

The six critical skills in obtaining a good quality sales lead are: presence, relating, questioning, listening, positioning, and checking. These are at the heart of consultative selling. A prospective sales lead is not a blank slate. You don’t have to try to educate a prospect. Instead, think of a sales lead in terms of assisting and helping them. One of the best opening ways of marketing to a potential sales lead is through sending some form of communication in an attempt to warm them up either in the post or via email. Then when you contact a sales lead by telephone, you have something to talk about, a reason to speak with them.

Because time gets compressed on the phone and because it is much easier for the sales lead to say no or disengage, an effective and natural opening is very important. A good opening requires that you have an agenda and a clear focus of what you wish to achieve with your sales lead before you make the call. Opening with a sales lead you haven’t met face to face with is usually more difficult than opening with someone with whom you already have a rapport. One face-to-face meeting usually helps personalise a telephone situation. Attaching a face to your voice will make a sales lead more receptive to your calls and ideas. For this reason, most telephone salespeople engaged in large or complex sales meet their prospects early in the relationship to add a human dimension.

One of the main skills when dealing with a sales lead is handling objections. Objections are a vital part of the sales process. Expect them and appreciate them. They will identify barriers but will aid the sales process by providing you with a way to gain credibility with your sales lead, if you deal with them well.

Almost all objections a sales lead will raise have been heard before. Therefore you can anticipate and prepare for them. If you can’t deal with the wave of objections a sales lead produces upfront on your first contact, you will lose opportunities because it is so easy for a sales lead to get off the telephone. This is why it is often a good idea to get a sales lead to agree to a meeting where you will have more chance to talk through what they are objecting to in a different setting and in a situation where the sales lead will be more open to listening to you.

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Knowledge Base:

1. What is a prospect list? Prospect List

2. How can I create interest in my companies products by using direct mail? Direct Mail

3. What are mailing lists? Mailing Lists

4. What is the purpose of direct marketing? Direct Marketing

5. How do I obtain a good quality sales lead? Sales Lead

6. What are the main functions of a list broker? List Broker

7. How to succeed with database marketing? Database Marketing

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